War Games

"War games" is what Dorothy Day called New York City's air raid drills in the 1950s. Beginning in 1955 Day and the Catholic Workers purposely parked themselves on benches in City Hall Park during the city's annual air raid drill. For defying the Civil Defense Act, which ordered everyone to take shelter during the 10-minute drill, they were arrested. "We wanted to act against war and getting ready for war," Day wrote in Loaves and Fishes. By 1960, when the city held its final drill, more than a thousand people had joined in the protest against "sham air raids."

In the 1980s the U.S. government is again trying to convince the public that the country can survive a nuclear war. In April, 1982, the Reagan administration presented to Congress a $4.2 billion, seven-year civil defense plan.

Last April Reagan officials requested congressional approval of $252 million for the fiscal year 1983 component of the program. Congress cut that figure almost in half, to $147 million--a resounding defeat for the administration. In January, 1983, Reagan requested $253 million for civil defense in 1984 virtually the same amount that Congress refused last year. According to Stan Norris of the Center for Defense Information (CDI), this request may signify the administration's intent to carry out the seven-year program, beginning one year behind schedule. This would be an unwise strategy, given the record of past civil defense programs and the response of the U.S. public this past year.

The Reagan administration claims its program for civil defense will protect 80 per cent of the U.S. population in the event of a nuclear war. Protection will be provided mainly through the Crisis Relocation Plan (CRP). According to the plan, 150 million people will be evacuated from 400 "high risk" areas to 2,000 low risk "host areas" 50 miles from target areas. High risk areas are the regions around military installations, as well as urban areas of more than 50,000 people.

Under the Reagan plan, groups of civil defense workers will direct the refugees from target areas to host areas where there will be 20,000 "shelter management" instructors. Also included in the CRP is the possible construction of blast shelters for "essential workers," enhanced protection for "key industries" and measures to protect both the members and operation of the government before, during, and after a nuclear attack. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in late 1981, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense T. K. Jones sought to allay the fears of American citizens when he advised that they should each "dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top." Jones revealed, "It's the dirt that does it."

The Reagan seven-year program is the first major increase in civil defense funding in two decades. According to CDI, the U.S. has spent $2.6 billion on civil defense since 1950. The president asked to spend $4.2 billion in just seven years.

Since the early 1960s, most government officials and students of nuclear strategy have believed that the United States and the Soviet Union live under the threat of "mutual assured destruction," or MAD: if either side launched an attack, it would suffer virtual total destruction in retaliation, regardless of which side attacked first. Civilian populations could not be protected. Consequently, funding for civil defense throughout the 1960s and '70s was a low priority. In the years since 1950, Congress often cut large portions from civil defense funding requests and rejected blast shelter and fallout shelter programs in particular.

In requesting an increase in civil defense funds, the Reagan administration signaled its rejection of the MAD concept. As Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times and others have pointed out, the president and his advisers believe that one of the superpowers may escape total destruction after launching an attack. They also believe that the United States could survive retaliation with the loss of "only" 20 per cent of its population (42 million people). Both assumptions are doubtful.

Reagan's civil defense plan is the domestic component of the nuclear war-fighting strategy of the U.S. government: with highly accurate nuclear weapons, the Reagan administration believes that the U.S. can fight and win a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. What was rejected for two decades by experts as impossible has now been formally rendered a component of the U.S. nuclear strategy. In this scenario first-strike weapons would allow the U.S. to destroy enough of the Soviet arsenal to limit the USSR's retaliatory strike to an "acceptable level"42 million dead. Crisis relocation thereby complements the deployment of first-strike weapons such as the MX, Pershing II, Trident II, and cruise missiles.

The Reagan program, devised by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), was opposed prior to its release by both the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Disputing FEMA's figures, the OMB estimated that the true cost of the program could easily surpass $10 billion, since the cost of real estate for shelter construction and the cost of inflation were not sufficiently taken into account. Despite its flaws, the plan was approved by the president.

In 1982, when the Reagan administration took its civil defense plan to those most affected by its provisions--the U.S. public--the response was immediate. According to Matthew Leighton of the Traprock Peace Center, more than 60 cities and counties have rejected FEMA's relocation plans. Leighton said that only 20 per cent of regional relocation plans have been received by FEMA and "fewer than that have come under public scrutiny," indicating that more opposition to the Reagan plan can be expected. Over the last several months, citizens' groups across the country have initiated public hearings and other measures to stop civil defense plans.

In May, 1982, the Philadelphia City Council unanimously adopted a resolution rejecting federal funds for planning the area's evacuation for a nuclear war. Testifying before the Public Safety Committee, Dr. Stuart Shapiro, the city's health commissioner, pointed out that the Reagan plan was dependent on having a week's warning to evacuate the city's residents. He said the city must oppose "silly plans" that propose "a six-minute evacuation for a ten-minute war." Fire commissioner Joseph Rizzo, who witnessed nuclear explosions at Bikini Island, said, "We can see no defense against nuclear attack.... There is nothing we can do in Philadelphia." In addition to rejecting the federal monies, the council endorsed the adoption of a sister city in the USSR to aid mutual understanding of the nuclear threat.

In North Carolina county emergency planners themselves rejected nuclear war defense planning. After her office had opposed the Reagan plan, the head of the Greensboro-Guilford county FEMA office, Marilyn Braun, organized a citizens' committee to examine the effects of nuclear war. Braun's office, according to the Nuclear Times, has won three national awards for emergency planning. But, after four years of study, Braun said she could not write a civil defense plan for the county "because there isn't any to develop."

Several cities and counties, such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Boulder, Colorado, not only refused federal funds for crisis relocation but went one step further: they appropriated local funds to produce booklets outlining the consequences of nuclear attacks on the local region (see "For the Record," Sojourners, December, 1981).

After FEMA required a regional plan, emergency planners in Marin County, California, began a draft relocation program that included the Waldo Tunnel as a shelter site. When the planners realized that a nuclear explosion in San Francisco "would blow people out of the tunnel like a shot from a cannon," the county board of supervisors issued a lengthy critique of federal crisis relocation plans.

In their booklet The Nuclear Threat to Marin County, the supervisors wrote that the Reagan plan "boggles the mind logistically." County health officials noted the lack of planning for hospitalized or incapacitated people and the dearth of food, shelter, and medical supplies in the host areas. Finally the board concluded that the Reagan plan "offers no real survival potential for our citizens" and could well "escalate rather than de-escalate an international crisis."

On election day last November, voters in Cleveland, Ohio, faced an unusual issue on their ballot. Voting on "Issue -5," Cleveland voters approved a city charter amendment prohibiting "the appropriation and/or expenditure" of funds for civil defense measures. By a slim margin, the citizens declared nuclear war planning "wasteful, unlawful, and not in the public interest."

Among the severest critics of government plans to wage nuclear war are doctors and medical institutions. Many representatives of the medical community have opposed the FEMA plans for relocation.

In 1981 the Defense Department proposed that hospitals reserve 50,000 beds for treatment of military casualties in a major overseas war, a plan known as the Civilian-Military Contingency Hospital System. Military officials first claimed that the expected casualties would result from a conventional war, then admitted the expected casualties could result from a tactical nuclear exchange. Within six months however, and after significant outcry from the medical community, officials changed their story back.

Critics of the plan have pointed out that thousands of European-based tactical nuclear weapons virtually guarantee that conventional war in Europe would quickly become a nuclear war, and that the hospital plan was part of governmental nuclear war planning.

While the Defense Department claims that it has reached its goal of 50,000 beds, opposition to the plan has been widespread. In November, 1982, the New York City Health and Hospital Corporation refused to participate in the hospital plan, denying that nuclear war "is somehow survivable or at least medically treatable." Earlier, the Associated Medical Schools of New York castigated the Defense Department plan as a "propaganda effort that suggests we have the medical capabilities to deal with the millions of casualties" in a nuclear war.

The Defense Department's proposal also was rejected by hospitals at the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, the University of California, the Contra Costa County medical staff in California, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the American Public Health Association (see "For the Record," Sojourners, December, 1981).

According to Physicians for Social Responsibility, the FEMA relocation plan and the Defense Department hospital plan contradict each other. In the aftermath of a nuclear war, the military would be requesting space in facilities that already would be stretched to the limit. A government arms control report in 1978 itself pointed out a more probable medical situation following nuclear war than the administration currently imagines. The study noted the "shortage or unavailability of post-attack medical care" and estimated that "80 to 90 per cent of urban hospitals would be destroyed because they are located near industrial installations."

Last summer the stand of one pastor raised the issue of participation in civil defense planning before the churches. In Charlottesville, Virginia, the pastor of a Roman Catholic parish refused a Defense Department official entry to inspect parish buildings as possible fallout shelters, because he believes the Reagan plan "enhances the possibility of nuclear war." Fr. Michael McCarron, pastor of the Church of the Incarnation, stated, "Church buildings would be open to anyone in need in any emergency, but planning for this particular emergency allows people to think nuclear war is winnable." McCarron's stand was supported by his parish council as well as the bishop of the Richmond diocese, Walter Sullivan.

The absurdity of the civil defense plans of President Reagan and his advisers has been pointed out in almost every forum in which the plan is seriously questioned. But its many flaws do not lessen the danger the relocation plan represents. Reagan and his advisers have made civil defense an integral component of the strategy that assumes the U.S. to be able to fight and win a nuclear war. Such plans are as dangerous as they are absurd.

Fr. McCarron reflected on his encounter with the inspector, and made connections to the biblical story of Solomon confronted with two mothers claiming the same infant son (1 Kings 3:16-27). When Solomon stated that he would divide the child in half, the false mother agreed, content that neither mother would have him. But the true mother renounced her claim, in order to save her son's life. Said McCarron: "The false mother claimed she loved the child, but she was willing to destroy it. That's what our country is saying--we claim to love it so much that we're willing to destroy it. We need to learn to love so much that we're willing to let things live."

Joe Lynch was a member of Sojourners Fellowship and worked with Sojourners peace ministry when this article appeared.